HI MrC,
yes, but it will be a few days before I get back to it. I'll let you know.

Ok, no problem, take your time. Thanks in advance!

Originally Posted by davexnet

When I gave A2d the ASS it detected the problem, but not when I gave it the SRT.
So A2D creates the SUP, even though it's invalid and the authoring fails.

What sw did you use to convert ASS to SRT?

Bye

It's one of the utilities from the old vobsub 2.23 package, subresync. With this program, you can open any subs and
save as many different types. It processed it just fine, I guess it doesn't report those kinds of errors!

As did the dshow FFDshow/subtitles outside of A2D - it must have dealt with the dups on the fly.

A related question: if your AVS job bombs out, but was partially completed, leaving behind a bunch of .m2v and .ac3 files in the Temp directory, is there anything that can still be done with them, to avoid having to do that part over again ? Or is it just a case where you might as well toss them ?

Yes, you can recover the already encoded assets. Just delete the log file and run the project without changing anything.

Bye

So, if I did that, it would just skip over the clips that had already been rendered, and continue on with the rest ? Just wanted to make sure I understood you . . . .

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

It's one of the utilities from the old vobsub 2.23 package, subresync. With this program, you can open any subs and
save as many different types. It processed it just fine, I guess it doesn't report those kinds of errors!

Thanks for the tip. Could you please share the original ASS file?

Originally Posted by Seeker47

So, if I did that, it would just skip over the clips that had already been rendered, and continue on with the rest ? Just wanted to make sure I understood you . . . .

If AVStoDVD finds m2v/ac3 assets files with the same output name, it will ask you if you want to overwrite them. If you are sure that the previously rendered assets are ok, then you can skip re-encoding.

It's one of the utilities from the old vobsub 2.23 package, subresync. With this program, you can open any subs and
save as many different types. It processed it just fine, I guess it doesn't report those kinds of errors!

Thanks for the tip. Could you please share the original ASS file?

Bye

MrC,
Apologies, I thought I'd posted it before - here it is :
Dave

I can confirm that after fixing up the subs and creating a new SRT, the DVD encoded and
authored properly.

MrC, I liked the chapters tool. It successfully found 5 chapters in that MKV file.

The program crashed again in the authoring stage. If you want to reproduce,
I picked any old unrelated avi file I had laying around
and made a 23 minute clip (to match the subs length)
in Virtualdub video/audio directstream copy. Created the A2D project using this clip
and added the ASS subs to the project.
Same crash as before.

I think the main issue is that the ASS sub sample contains multiple layers, that become redundant in the converted SUP.

For example, if you delete rows from 323 on (layer "0"), it will remain only layer "3" in the ASS file. Authoring should complete without errors.

In the last "exe only" release, I have just polished the ASS2SRT conversion routine by handling (mostly removing) the special formatting (such as fade in/out) allowed by ASS but not SRT. The ASS2SRT routine needs further improvement.

I just had a case of an .Avi that had 3 subtitle streams in its accompanying Sub / Idx pair. AVS only picked up on the first one, which identified itself as English, but was actually Chinese. There was also (as found by Subtitle Edit 3.0) a "0x21" that was some other Asian language, and then finally a "0x22" which was the English. (I knew the English subs had to be in there, because I saw them when playing the AVI with the VLC player . . . which I think also misidentified the subtitle streams, but let you choose any of them to use.) Letting AVS handle this job in the usual way just installed the Chinese subs. I saw no way to get to the other two.

I thought you had a somewhat automated routine for converting Sub / Idx to .Srt, which I'd actually seen work in the past (Sub / Idx being really a pain-in-the-rear choice, so I'm wondering why it gets used as often as it does), but my recall might be faulty on that. So I wound up converting it manually with SE3. That turned out to be quite tedious and annoying, perhaps largely due to my general unfamiliarity with the program, but I think the result may be usable. For the future, though, I think I'd like to find an easier way.

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

Please forgive me if this question has been asked before, I did an exhaustive search on the internet and could not find the answer. I would like to know if during the creation of the menu thumbnails (motion) I can adjust the start point? Currently, it starts during the blank or boring part of the video. I would like it to start maybe 5 minutes into the video when something more exciting is happening. I tried changing Thumb Frames Position to 25% and there was no difference. But perhaps I misunderstand the use of this function. Thank you for taking the time to read my post and for a most excellent software. -Adam

you are right, AVStoDVD support to idx/sub format is quite basic. In your situation, the intermediate step with SE3 is necessary. Both ass/ssa and idx/sub conversion routines have to be improved. Do you have the possibility to upload the AVI to make some tests?

@Adamtrons

'Thumb Frames Position' applies only to Static Menu. In fact it should be grayed out (cosmetic bug - thanks for the report).

To change the thumb start point you have to:
- enter the Menu Editor mode
- select 'Edit' instead of 'Preview'
- click on the title thumbnail
- change the 'Frame Start' and 'Frame End' values

For example if you are NTSC user, and you want to display 15 seconds starting from minute 5:00, you have to put 8991 (5x60x29.97) in 'Frame Start' and 9441 (8991+15x29.97) in 'Frame End'.

you are right, AVStoDVD support to idx/sub format is quite basic. In your situation, the intermediate step with SE3 is necessary. Both ass/ssa and idx/sub conversion routines have to be improved. Do you have the possibility to upload the AVI to make some tests?

Not directly -- it's close to a Gig in size -- and I suppose it is technically commercial in nature and therefore copyrighted, though not available here at all, not even listed by Amazon or IMDB. I could send you d/l links by PM, though. For me it's academic now: the manual conversion was a nuisance, but successful, and AVS put the resulting .Srt in just fine.

I seem to have a knack for tripping over these glitches. First that 3-in-1 language track thing, and now this . . . .

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

Thank you for responding to my question. That is exactly what I was looking for. However, after I tried it on my project today, I was surprised to find the thumbnails reverted back the default values. Perhaps I missed a step? Here is exactly what I did:

-First I created my project.
-I tried to select the Menu Editor but the option was grayed out. I assumed this meant I had to run the Menu Wizard first.
So I ran the Menu Wizard and at the end, it automatically took me to the Menu Editor.
-I switched the Mode to Edit
-I selected each thumbnail and entered the Frame Start and Frame End values. After some time, I saw new video thumbnails appear and it looked successful.
-I did not see a Save option, so I clicked Menu/Exit to close the Editor.
-I then clicked Start to run the project.
-After 4 hours, I checked the result of the project only to find the thumbnails went back to the same default values at start position 0. It seems like it used the menu previously created and did not create the new one. Maybe there is something more I need to do to save the settings or regenerate the menu with the new values?

if the source is not 100% legal, we should put off this issue in the forum environment, do you agree?

@Adamtrons

there must be something wrong: you cannot enter the Menu Editor without going thru the Menu Wizard, unless you have saved the old AVStoDVD project and reloaded it. I would suggest to start from scratch, because the listed steps of the previous post are correct to get what you need. Let me know.

if the source is not 100% legal, we should put off this issue in the forum environment, do you agree?

Yes, I try to be respectful of the rules at places like VH. The fact remains though that there is a lot of content -- some of it pretty obscure -- that is just not available here, and probably never will be. Films that played at some film festival in various countries, but have otherwise never seen the light of day. No distribution here, or no distribution, period. (And I have to think the filmmakers had some hopes that their work would be seen.) I've got quite a few titles that have been sitting in the Netflix "Saved" queue for 5+ years now, ETA unknown, and at this point they are a case of "don't hold your breath." If there was some way to buy or rent them, I would. (I subscribe to just about every premium film channel offered by the satellite provider, so it's not a hesitation to spend the $$.)

For something like half a century, there was no way to see Kubrick's first film, "Fear and Desire." He reportedly hated it, and basically "disappeared" it off the face of the earth. Two or three times over the years, I went with friends to catch a supposed screening of it -- like at LACMA, or a university film society. We get to the ticket window, only to find a sign that the film was withdrawn at the last minute (again !), screening cancelled. (Do you in Italy have any familiarity with the famous Charles Schultz "Peanuts" cartoon strips, with Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football ? She always pulled the same stunt, and he always fell for it -- literally.) There were grainy, very poor quality bootleg copies of this film around on the internet, but they were essentially unwatchable. Anyway, a few months ago, the Kubrick estate finally relented, allowing the film to be shown on TCM. So, I finally got to see it, within my lifetime. It wasn't particularly good, but as a longtime film buff I still needed to see it.

In other cases, something is just long out of print, or rights disputes will keep a given title vanished or banished for many years, sometimes decades. I could cite plenty of examples. Or cases like an avowed epic for which there simply are no legit sources: every release of it has been an unauthorized bootleg of some sort. If you wanted to try and be super-ethical, you could go to Taiwan, track down the producer or the director (if they are still around !), and press some money into their hand . . . but that's about it.

Faced with the choice of seeing it or never getting to see it, I choose the former. This is my defense for "other means" and "other channels." I make no apologies for it. And your fine program -- which you do an admirable job of maintaining -- has proven very helpful in allowing me to view this work properly, more as the creators no doubt intended, rather than shrunk down onto a computer screen.

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

Thanks for your kind words towards AVStoDVD. I could personally agree or disagree with you and the opportunity to see cinephile footage, outside the "standard" channels, but that's not the main point, I don't want to be super-ethical, just to follow the rules in the world where we live, whatever it is real world or VideoHelp forum.

The main point is that, very very often, not-100%-legal material is poorly encoded and I really do not like to spend my time in trying to understand how to fix junk AVI/MKV/MP4 and convert them to DVD. There is so many other ways to spend free time... Your source AVI will surely not fit the case, but I think you may agree with the general statement.

OK I tried editing the Menu Thumbnail Frame Start and End values again. I started from scratch and took screen shots at each step. I had some very strange results.

Here in Screen Shot 1, you see I’ve entered the Menu Editor, clicked on the Thumbnail and entered new Frame Start and End values, based on the math equation provided in the previous post. This should start the thumbnails 2 minutes in and end at 2 min, 15 seconds. I did this for all 5 thumbnails.

So now I’m wondering if anyone has tested this feature and know for sure that it works? Is it possible to change the default Frame Start by editing any file in the program? It is certainly not a big problem, but would be nice to have this fixed. Thank you for your time!

OK I've tried to edit the Thumbnails several more times now. On this last attempt, I took your suggestion to enter the new frame start/end points, exit from Menu Editor and re-enter Menu Editor. When I re-entered it looked good. Here is what I see:

This is a very strange problem and difficult to test because I have to wait 4 hours before I can see what happens. I am using AVStoDVD_250Alpha120506_NoInstall. Since it's "no install" I can't de/reinstall the program to try and fix. Ha ha. I think I will give up and use the defaults for now and maybe in the future you can add a feature to adjust the frame to 10, 25% for the motion thumbnails the way it does with the still thumbnails. Have a nice day. -Adam

Try to force HCenc instead of QuEnc. You can do that either from 'Preferences'/'Video' (select one of the two HCenc profiles and then lock the bitrates level with the proper button) or title by title from 'Edit Title'/'Video'.

Bye

Fixed the problem by upgrading Muxman to the latest 0.16.8 free version. The version shipped with Avstodvd seems to be 0.15R.. This is from the release notes..

thank you very much for the evaluable report. If I remember correctly MuxMan release 0.16.8 starts with a splash screen, doesn't it?

Bye

I don't generally sit in front of my PC watching AVS do it's stuff, so I hadn't noticed one.. But I ran it again this morning on a short file just to see, and yes, you are right.. There is a 5 second splash screen..

I can live with that. It's either use the new version which fixes the underrun problem, or use ConvertXtoDVD which didn't have a problem with the source files at all.

The program crashed again in the authoring stage. If you want to reproduce,
I picked any old unrelated avi file I had laying around
and made a 23 minute clip (to match the subs length)
in Virtualdub video/audio directstream copy. Created the A2D project using this clip
and added the ASS subs to the project.
Same crash as before.

Dave,

could you give a look to this new Alpha hotfix? It should directly convert properly the multi-layer ASS to SUP.

Just wondering which is best way to upgrade to newer version of AVStoDVD, just install over older version or first uninstall previous version, then install new version. This may have been answered elsewhere but I did a search and didn't find anything.

Just wondering which is best way to upgrade to newer version of AVStoDVD, just install over older version or first uninstall previous version, then install new version. This may have been answered elsewhere but I did a search and didn't find anything.

Are you talking about the exe_only update just posted?

Extract the exe file and copy to the existing directory, overlaying the old file.

Just wondering which is best way to upgrade to newer version of AVStoDVD, just install over older version or first uninstall previous version, then install new version. This may have been answered elsewhere but I did a search and didn't find anything.